A hospital says its street-level motorized couriers were taking over half an hour to travel under 2 miles to a lab at another hospital. It has decided to try drones instead.

At the moment, transferring samples between Guy’s Hospital and the lab at St Thomas’ Hospital – a journey by road of nearly two miles – can take more than half an hour using van or motorbike couriers, but the samples can be transported in less than two minutes by drone.

A non-motorized bicycle takes under 10 minutes to go less than 2 miles in London. So the first question probably could be why supposedly health conscious hospitals aren’t also testing cyclists (and promoting clear roads for bicycles)? Add an electric bike to this test and time probably shrinks to 5 minutes.

Given the complications and cost of drones, a bigger question here is why anyone in a city ever thought in the first place that a van was the right call to take a small package less than two miles.

Maybe someone likes big complicated things with lots of moving parts, prone to high touch operations, instead of using easy and obvious solutions.